On every continent but Antarctica, nesting or entangled birds have been photographed in our garbage.
People from all across the world submitted photographs to the online project Birds and Debris.
The project’s experts report seeing birds entangled or nesting in everything from rope and fishing line to balloon ribbon and a pair of flip-flops.
Nearly one-fourth of the images depict birds nesting or becoming trapped in disposable face masks.
The initiative focuses on documenting the impact of garbage, specifically plastic pollution, on the avian world.
“Essentially, if a bird constructs a nest utilizing long fibrous materials, such as seaweed, branches, or reeds, there is a good possibility it will include human detritus in the nest,” said Dr. Alex Bond of the Natural History Museum in London, one of the researchers involved.
The initiative, which he and his team have been working on for four years, aims to call attention to the pervasive environmental problem of plastic garbage.
“Once you begin searching for this material, you will find it everywhere,” he remarked. We received reports from Japan, Australia, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, and North America, indicating that this is genuinely a global issue.
In a recent study, the team examined how many of the submitted photographs depict pandemic-related personal protection equipment (PPE). They discovered that it appeared in about a quarter of the submitted images.
“It’s virtually entirely masked,” Dr. Bond stated. “And if you consider the many components that a surgical mask is comprised of, there’s the elastic that gets tangled around birds’ legs, or the fabric or the hard piece of plastic that fixes it over your nose.
Masks are a fantastic example of the variety of polymers that fall under the umbrella word “plastic.”
The researchers state that they wish to draw attention to the “systemic problem” that causes so much trash to wind up in the ecosystem.
The lead researcher, Justine Ammendolia of Dalhousie University in Canada, told that it was “devastating” to witness the global impact on species.
“In April of 2020, the first observation of a bird hanging from a facemask in a tree was reported in Canada, and subsequent sightings spread globally,” she explained. It merely highlights the damage that humans are capable of doing to the global environment in a very brief period.
“Changing to a bamboo toothbrush or a canvas shopping bag would not save the world,” Dr. Bond explained, “since the majority of large-scale plastic production today is commercial and industrial.”
Therefore, ‘enough is enough is a combination of top-down policies and bottom-up pressure.
He compared the worldwide action necessary to address plastic pollution to the Montreal Protocol, which prohibited ozone-depleting chemicals and is widely regarded as one of the most effective global agreements ever negotiated.
“The same is required for plastic pollution, and we are moving in that direction, albeit very, very slowly.”
